Reporter Nick Gibson is in Orlando, Florida, this week to report on Anne McClain’s and NASA’s SpaceX launch from the Kennedy Space Center. Follow along in print and online at spokesman.com/sections/return-to-space.
Shari Manikowski sees connections everywhere.
She looks upon a crowd and sees little invisible strings, tying each and every human being together. To Manikowski, we’re all related to Kevin Bacon, just six degrees of separation away from one another.
Some of the connections Manikowski makes can be fuzzy and hard to follow as an outside observer. Others are wonderfully simplistic, like those between Manikowski, her former students and a mission to space.
“Quantum physics says we’re all energy,” Manikowski said. “Energy cannot be created, nor destroyed. So what if?”
Now retired, Manikowski educated some of Spokane’s most prominent figures during her nearly 24 years of teaching at Gonzaga Prep, including Congressman Michael Baumgartner, Spokane County Superior Court Judge Tony Hazel, a litany of local principals and Steve Gleason, a retired NFL football player and Congressional Gold Medal recipient for his work advocating for those diagnosed with ALS.
But she likes to say her “claim to fame” is having the privilege of being NASA astronaut Anne McClain’s high school math teacher.
On Wednesday, Manikowsi’s former student turned friend will lead a team of four on a mission to the International Space Station; McClain will serve as commander of NASA’s Space X Crew 10 launch, taking off from platform 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. Manikowski will be in attendance as an invited guest, alongside McClain’s friends and family.
Not many people stay in touch with their high school math teacher, but then again, not many people are astronauts, or rocket scientists.
McClain’s last voyage aboard the orbiting vessel became a mainstay of Manikowski’s classes during the 2018-19 academic year. She tied space travel concepts to course material, marked significant milestones of McClain’s journey and managed to set up a pair of “downlinks” that allowed the astronaut to address the students of her alma mater directly while floating 350 miles above the Earth’s surface.
Interweaving McClain’s mission, story and words of encouragement into the lessons that year led to one of Manikowski’s favorite “connections.”
Victoria Stefoglo, then a student, credits the experience as a launching point to set and achieve her goal of landing in the aerospace industry. The recently minted engineer landed a job with SpaceX last June, spending the first four months on the team behind the rocket that will propel McClain to space.
“I’m so thankful, so grateful and proud to be here,” Stefoglo said. “And also humbled because, wow, I couldn’t have imagined myself here five years ago when I was sitting in that high school desk at Gonzaga Prep, just dreaming about this.”
Stefoglo grew up in Spokane as the youngest daughter of a pair of Ukrainian refugees who immigrated to the U.S. in 1997. She said she always had an interest in math as a kid, and greatly enjoyed being around her dad’s residential construction company, Elite Construction & Remodel.
“All the construction stuff, or anything that has to do with building things, I loved doing with my dad growing up,” Stefoglo said. “But I didn’t know that there was an application for it in real life. I didn’t know that it was called engineering.”
Stefoglo said she became more familiar by her sophomore year, and landed on studying mechanical engineering, with the eventual goal of a role in aerospace development over the course of her junior year. SpaceX popped up on her radar after a visit that same year from Ryan Kellogg, a senior engineer on the company’s Starship team and another one of Manikowski’s former students.
“I hope Miss Manikowski knows, all those fun, inspirational visit videos she showed us in class, and always hyping up Anne McClain and the space stuff, it was always so cool,” Stefoglo said. “She was quite impactful in that way.”
Stefoglo joined Kellogg’s team a few months ago, coalescing their Spokane coalition. When asked what advice she had for young people also from their area, Stefoglo told them to shoot for the stars, even if the journey there gets a little uncomfortable.
“They should chase after it and not be intimidated by, like, the big name, or by the new location, new city, or moving away from your family, or anything like that,” Stefoglo said, “It’s totally worth it.”
Her father, Sergey Stefoglo, said she’s always been a driven individual. He’s proud, but not surprised that his daughter achieved her goals shortly after graduating from Washington State University last May.
“She’s a very hard worker,” Sergey Stefoglo said. “Of course, because nothing comes for free, you got to put a lot of hard work in, in getting anything done. It doesn’t matter if it’s construction or aerospace industry or anything else.”
Early last week, Manikowski flashed a smile as she pointed to a photo of a young Stefoglo holding up a “Happy 100 days in space” sign taken during McClain’s last mission.
“I just love there’s connections upon connections with this, of all these kids that sat in my classroom,” she said.
It’s incredible, Manikowski said, to know the students she hoped to inspire by incorporating McClain into their studies really were inspired. She loves the idea of Stefoglo, Kellogg and McClain working together, albeit in their own silos, as it confirms her hypothesis that all human beings are more entangled than we may realize.
That theory was inspired, in part, by McClain and their friendship over the years. Manikowski was once McClain’s softball coach, and the two remained in touch during her time at West Point. She even got to hang out with McClain’s fellow space travelers while watching the last mission launch from the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston.
“It’s the sort of journey where the teacher becomes the student, student becomes the teacher, back and forth,” Manikowski said.
McClain launched and landed in Kazakhstan last go-round, reiterating upon her return how lovely it was to be around other human beings. They didn’t need to be from the same place, have remotely the same life experiences or even communicate in the same language for her to find common ground and love in her heart.
Manikowski said she looks forward to seeing who else from the Inland Northwest will find inspiration in McClain’s journey, and the heights they’ll go on to reach.
“I just keep thinking about all the Spokane students who get to see all these connections and say, ‘You know what? I could do that.’”
